The present invention relates to an apparatus for feeding infants with cleft palate and/or cleft lip.
The present invention has solved a long standing problem of feeding infants with cleft lip and/or cleft palate. Specifically, cleft lip and/or cleft palate is the second most common birth defect and occurs approximately in one out of 700-800 live births in the United States. There are three types of cleft lip. These are the unilateral incomplete, the unilateral complete and the bilateral complete. The cleft palate comes in three versions, the soft palate only, the unilateral complete and the bilateral complete. However, each of the cleft lip and/or cleft palate malformations involve a leakage of air from the mouth through the nose which causes the infant to be unable to suck, causes regurgitation of fluids through the nose and involves difficulty in swallowing and breathing.
Until the cleft lip and/or cleft palate can be surgically corrected (generally six months after birth) the infant must be adequately fed until he is strong enough and has matured enough for the plastic surgery that can correct the problem. Feeding is not only the most immediate problem encountered in the daily care of an infant with a cleft lip and/or cleft palate, but it is the most difficult to solve and the most necessary for the survival and thriving of the infant.
Several devices and methods have been tried to allow the infant to take nourishment. First, the prior art has produced a feeding plate which fits into the palate and seals off the cleft in both the lip and the palate to enable the infant to generate intraoral negative pressure to pull nourishment from conventional bottle nipples or from the breast. Of course, negative intraoral pressure (vacuum caused by sucking) is accomplished by sealing the lips and the velopharynx and expanding the intraoral cavity, either through contraction of the tongue or by movement of the mandible. The feeding plate is not without its problems. Specifically, the plate must be custom-made for the infant, is uncomfortable to the infant, will become obsolete as the infant grows, may be partially swallowed by the infant, has a tendency to irritate the palate and lip of the child and does not allow the infant the natural feel of the nipple.
Next, the prior art has taught to use long and thin nipples on a bottle with the nipple placed in the back of the infant's mouth. The milk is then injected into the infant's throat so that he may swallow the milk without sucking. This method is an attempt to bypass the problem of the infant's inability to suck and does not allow for breast feeding of the infant, causes frequent choking and aspiration and prevents the child from experiencing the normal sucking instinct and developing the muscles of the mouth which are believed to aid in language articulation in later life.
Next, the prior art has taught to use wide nipples such as lambs' nipples which by their nature attempt to fill in the cleft palate in order to increase the intraoral negative pressure that the infant can generate. However, these nipples often collapse into the cleft palate and/or cleft lip cutting off the flow of milk to the infant and they are substantially ineffective in significantly increasing the ability to generate intraoral negative pressure.
The prior art has also taught miscellaneous methods such as squirting milk either from the breast or the bottle into side of the mouth of the infant as well as the use of naso-gastric or oro-gastric tubes to inject the nutrients directly into the infant's stomach.
The problems with the prior art's attempted solutions to the problem of feeding the infant with a cleft palate and/or cleft lip are that they either bypass the problem of the infant not being able to suck the nutrients from the bottle or breast or they provide incomplete or marginally effective methods of allowing the infant to take nourishment by sucking. The prior art methods and devices which attempt to increase the intraoral negative pressure have several disadvantages. Specifically, the infant is prevented from experiencing the natural sucking instinct, is prevented from developing the muscles of the face and mouth which are responsible for developing proper articulation in later life, is subject to regurgitation of milk through the nose as well as choking and aspiration on the milk and is subject to becoming irritable due to the extremely long amount of time necessary to consume small amounts of nutrients.
The present invention was created in response to the specific problem with the oversize nipples that have been used in the past in an attempt to effectively feed the infant with a cleft lip and/or cleft palate. The problem with these nipples again is that they often collapse within the cleft palate and/or cleft lip, cutting off the flow of milk. The present invention has solved this problem and allowed virtually any infant with cleft palate and/or cleft lip to effectively nurse either from the bottle or the breast.